How I Got Alex Jones to Open Up

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When you're interviewing Alex Jones, the CIA tends to come up a lot. Not just the usual Bay of Pigs/Kennedy assassination/overthrow of Mossadegh but also exotic stuff like the LSD experiments and the postwar weltanschauung of the Dulles brothers. Eventually I have to turn off the digital recorder and tell him my father was CIA.

Of course, he can't let this go. Soon he's doing his radio show with me sitting in a chair nearby, and he keeps trying to get me to come over to the mic and talk about the CIA.

"Not while I'm reporting a story," I say.

"CIA doesn't allow it."

"Worse than that: my editor."

Shaking his head, he complains to his invisible audience. "He said his editor wouldn't let him. And by the way, I didn't even know when I got this guy here, and he was like, 'So, you know I'm with the CIA, or my dad was.'"

In future tellings of this story, I'm pretty sure, I will become a full officer of the CIA.

"He's been here trying to deprogram me," Jones continues, "to where I will except that Obama loves me and cares about me and that the drone program is a lesser of evils. Is that right, John?"

"No comment."

"No comment. Oh boy."

Things pick up, finally, when I ask Jones for his take on the World Trade Organization riots in Seattle in 1999.

"The Delta Force ran that. They hired provocateurs. The cops said, 'We were ordered to watch them loot and attack, then we were ordered to attack the peaceful crowd.' I made a film about it: Police State 2: The Takeover. It's funny you raised that."

"I was there," I tell him.

"Wow, so you saw that happen?"

I nod. Most of the media reported it as the work of anarchists, but in truth the Seattle police started attacking peaceable protestors after a handful of punks broke a few windows nearby. For two days, I watched them marching down otherwise calm streets in their black riot gear, setting off percussion bombs and teargassing innocent bystanders. "It was eye-opening for me," I tell him. "You really saw, 'Oh, this riot was kind of created. It was a police riot.'"

"I agree — it's a police riot."

"The only reporters who got it right were from The New York Times, oddly enough. The TV media played it the way the cops said."

"Yeah, it sounds insane saying the Delta Force was there. You can look it up. They flew in fifty guys from a training camp in Oregon. That's why I think it shouldn't be surprising that we're living in a total police state because all the TV is a big propaganda machine — I mean, you were there and you don't know that Delta Force flew in fifty scumbags to make the protestors all look bad. It's so sophisticated, it sounds crazy."

Even now, this still sounds crazy to me. Classic Alex Jones overkill. The police riot is bad enough — does he have to add America's most elite and secretive counterinsurgency team? And don't we have a law that forbids military operations on American soil? But as soon as I fire up a search engine, I find a news clip reporting that the Special Forces "took up residence in a Regrade motel and fanned out downtown dressed as demonstrators," with some others "wearing their jungle greens."